As Apollo walked into the precinct along the Sacred Way, a faint smile curved his lips, not unlike the smiles on the two marble kouroi that flanked the path. These were old statues, faintly Egyptian in their stiff poses and almond-shaped eyes. Hundreds of other, more classical figures lined the street beyond. Marble and bronze effigies of kings, gods, and heroes competed for space atop long plinths. On one pedestal stood a massive wooden Trojan Horse. On another, a bull plated in silver with gilded horns. The inscriptions identified them as offerings to great Apollo from different city-states, the wealth of an entire civilization on display.
It’s like Times Square and Fifth Avenue and Epcot Center all rolled into one, Selene thought, her head swimming at the sight of so much decadence.
Cities as far away as Syracuse had built entire treasuries within Delphi’s walls, their columned porticoes heaped with gold and silver booty—all gifts to the god. Selene wondered, awestruck, if her own sanctuaries had been so laden with wealth. She thought she’d long ago forgotten such details of her past, but to her surprise, an image of Brauron came to mind, the town south of Athens that had housed the priestesses and young girls dedicated to Artemis.
Yes, I had my offerings inside within a small temple, she recalled, but they were gifts from families asking for the protection of their daughters. Simple statues of me, my family, the girls themselves. Nothing, she had to admit, half so grand as this.
She tried not to feel jealous as they continued up the hillside, but jealousy came easily to the gods. Although the Selene part of herself felt nothing but revulsion at the idea of massive crowds of men standing at her gate, Artemis’s pride came surging back. I deserve such treasure, she decided, even as she fought against the thought. I REQUIRE worship.
They passed more buildings, more pedestals—a limestone boulder dedicated to their mother Leto, a marble sphinx perched three stories high atop an Ionian column, a massive bronze tripod balanced on a serpentine pillar—until finally they stood beneath the colossal golden statue Selene had seen from the road. Its straight nose, generous mouth, and soft jaw mirrored the features of the man beside her.
This is not the first time my twin has visited his holy city, she knew, struck by the statue’s verisimilitude. They have seen his face before. The next thought came unbidden: I will have to remind my own worshipers to build me a statue even taller.
Between the statue and the painted temple stood a tall gray altar piled with wood. From higher up the slope, a priest came running down the path leading a kid goat. The animal bleated mournfully. The other priests tutted and clucked like nervous hens, clearly afraid the kid would balk at such a pace: An unwilling sacrifice would be a great affront to the god. Bad enough on a normal day of consultation—the entire oracle would be canceled and the hundreds of supplicants forced to bide their time for another month—worse yet to show such disrespect to the epiphany of the god himself. But the priests need not have worried. Apollo raised a hand and the animal instantly quieted; its sharp hooves rang merrily on the stones as it trotted obediently toward the altar.
With a single slice of the knife, the kid met its end. Rather than burn only the fat and bones as usual, Apollo’s priests tossed the entire animal onto the altar, added a small fortune’s worth of myrrh, and lit the pyre.
Selene stood beside her brother as he inhaled the sweet smoke. She tried to do the same, expecting it to fill her with power. Instead, she had to stifle a cough, reminded suddenly of the 1980s, before New York City’s cigarette ban, when smoke clouded every restaurant. This burnt offering was not meant for her—it could give her nothing. Yet Apollo only breathed more deeply, his aura brightening.
He walked up the wide ramp into the temple’s vestibule. Selene followed, taking it all in. Chasing the young syndexios through Ostia, she’d been able to recall snatches, images, of what life in that city had been like two thousand years before. But actually walking through the past was a completely different experience. The colors were brighter than she’d remembered. No crumbled marble could possibly compare with the brilliantly painted pediments of Apollo’s temple or the man-high piles of glittering offerings heaped beside its soaring Doric columns. The odor of burnt flesh and myrrh titillated her senses, but she tried to think of the temple as no more than a museum. A place to tour—and then leave.
I cannot let myself enjoy this. I cannot want to stay, she thought desperately.
Overhead, scores of votive shields and cuirasses—even a few entire chariots—hung from the temple’s rafters. On the walls of the vestibule, over a hundred sayings were etched in gold. Wise words from wise men. The largest simply proclaimed, KNOW THYSELF.
Easier said than done, Selene thought, staring at a nearby fresco that reached from marble floor to coffered bronze ceiling. The painting depicted a battle that felt all too familiar after Saturn’s retelling: the Gigantomachy. The Olympians battling Saturn’s giants at the beginning of the world.
Zeus stood at the center of the fresco in all his glory, his thunderbolt raised to throw like a javelin. Beside him stood his brother Poseidon with his trident, Dionysus wielding his pinecone-tipped thyrsus like a spear, Athena cloaked in her tasseled aegis with Medusa’s Gorgon face emblazoned across her chest. The painting’s Artemis, her bow drawn and her arrow aimed at a hundred-armed giant, bore a familiar stony gaze and square jaw.
No, Selene reminded herself. That’s not me anymore. But if I stay here any longer … it will be me again.
She eyed the portrait uneasily. “Please tell me this temple is the way back to Rome.”
“Why would you want to go to Rome?” Apollo sounded bewildered. “It’s a place of clay temples and warring tribes. They won’t build their marble monuments to us for many years.”
“Theo’s there,” she reminded him. “And Flint and Scooter and Father. They need us. That’s where we belong. This isn’t our time anymore.”
“We are timeless,” he responded, ignoring the rest of her pleas.
In the center of the chamber, a sacred fire crackled in a round hearth between two altars. Nearby, a short staircase led into an open pit. Selene followed her brother down the steps, unsure what else to do. She’d arrived in this world because Apollo’s soul had taken her there.
He would need to lead the way back out.
Dirt covered the pit’s floor, not marble, for the oracle had once belonged to their great-grandmother Gaia, Mother Earth, and from her all prophecies arose. Gaia, so the story went, had placed the dragon Python to guard the oracle. When Apollo slew the monster, he claimed the site—and the prophecies—for himself. Now, when the priests of Delphi chose a woman to serve as the oracle’s prophetess, they titled her “Pythia” in honor of the slain beast.
The prophetess sat hidden in the pit behind a woolen curtain. No supplicant to the shrine could be allowed to see her face. Yet Apollo pushed aside the curtain as carelessly as he might open the drapes in his New York apartment. This was, after all, his house.
The male priest who served the prophetess inside the oracular cell started with alarm, then instantly knelt when he saw the nature of the intruder. He held a tin tablet and stylus in his hand, ready to record the Pythia’s words so they might be taken back to whatever city had sent a delegation to consult her. But seeing the Athanatoi before him, he put the stylus down.
Apollo walked over to a tall bronze tripod—a three-legged stool topped by a round bowl. Usually, such tripods held oil or flame, but this one held the Pythia herself atop its basin, her legs dangling a foot above the ground. The elderly woman wore a simple knee-length white dress and a wreath of Apollo’s sacred laurel around her brows.
The only other objects in the room were two golden eagle statues and a limestone rock the size and shape of a distended womb—or the top of an egg. A net of lambswool beaded with gold couldn’t hide the stone’s cracked surface, striated gray and orange like the cliffs around Delphi. Selene recognized it: the Omphalos—the Navel.
In the beginning of time, so
it was said, Zeus had released two of his sacred eagles. They flew around the sphere of the world in opposite directions until they met again on this very rock, marking Delphi as the navel of the world, the place from which mankind would be reborn.
In the next age, men descended into barbarism, murdering their own kin, lying and stealing with impunity, and ignoring the gods. Finally, the Olympians released a great flood to wash away the human race and start anew. Later, the Hebrews would tell of Noah, but the Greeks knew that only Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the deluge. The pious couple landed their boat safely right here in Delphi, atop the summit of Mount Parnassos.
Now I, too, have washed up on these shores, Selene realized. A vestige of another world.
A new scent mingled with the heavy myrrh, rising through three small holes in the ground around the Omphalos. Sweet and pungent like overripe fruit. The Pythia breathed deeply, inhaling the vapors, and her eyeballs darted back and forth beneath closed lids as if she walked through a dream.
When Apollo spoke, the Pythia chanted in chorus, her lips mirroring his. Her voice was resonant, rough, the voice of a chthonic spirit, not an old woman.
She speaks for Apollo, Selene remembered. To consult the oracle at Delphi was to consult the god himself. The Pythia’s trance was more than just visions brought about by the underground vapors. She was en-theos, “with the god,” a state far more profound than mere enthusiasm.
“Here I inhale the breath of Earth herself,” god and prophet chanted together. Then a pause, as if they waited for the supplicant to ask a question.
If mortal men consulted the oracle for a thousand years, Selene figured, I guess I can, too. “Tell me how to get back where I belong,” she said in the ancient tongue. “Tell me how to get to the other world.”
The Pythia took another deep breath. In one hand she held a woolen thread tied to the Omphalos’s netted covering, in the other, a branch of laurel. Her entire body began to vibrate, and the leaves of her branch clattered like the flapping of crows’ wings. Her voice emerged even hoarser than before as she and Apollo said as one:
“The bridge between worlds hangs on lyre’s strings.”
Selene waited for more. The Pythia continued to tremble. Apollo merely stood above the holes in the floor, breathing the vapors with a look of sublime tranquility.
“I don’t know what that means,” Selene said finally. She dared not interpret the Pythia’s words carelessly: That always led to disaster.
She still remembered the story of King Croesus, legendarily wealthy ruler of the Lydians, who’d once asked the oracle whether he should march against his neighbors. The reply: “If you do, a great empire will fall.” Croesus heard only what he wanted to hear and promptly invaded, assured of success. But the empire that fell was, of course, his own.
Better to look at the answer more critically, as the great Athenian general Themistocles had done when told how to defend his city from the Persians. “A wooden wall only shall not fail,” the prophetess had said. Themistocles wisely interpreted the “wooden wall” as the Athenian navy, and he successfully defeated the attackers at sea.
I am not as arrogant as Croesus nor as wise as Themistocles, Selene thought. The inscription on the temple wall said, “Know thyself”—as if that’s the key to understanding the oracle. Good luck with that. I’m not even sure who I am anymore—goddess or mortal or something in between.
The vapors from the ground were beginning to make her head spin. She felt a stab of despair, quickly overcome by irritation.
“I have no time for riddles,” she snapped at the old woman. “I just need to save an Athanatos from death, or the past, or whatever this place is. I want to go home—is that too much to ask?”
The oracle raised her arms toward the ceiling and threw her head back. At the same moment, Apollo mirrored her gestures in reverse, reaching toward the ground and bowing his head.
The voice of Gaia herself, deep and rough and filled with power, spoke through their mouths:
“Seek the Wise Virgin. Not in Athens is her seat, but where the Virgin is tall. There the cure is the spear that can conquer the greatest foe.”
“Great. Thanks. But wisdom’s never been my strong suit,” Selene insisted in English. “And I’m ridiculously tall right here. Look at me!” The male priest, she noticed, was surreptitiously inscribing the oracle’s words on his tin tablet, clearly wishing to preserve them for posterity.
“Stop that!” She kicked his stylus aside with her oversized foot. “You don’t need to write it down, because it doesn’t make any sense.”
The man cowered, his hands over his head. He couldn’t understand her words, but everyone in the ancient world understood her wrath.
Selene just rolled her eyes and took her brother by the elbow. “Let’s go.”
Apollo wouldn’t move. “This is my womb,” he intoned. The Pythia echoed his words.
“No, it’s not. This may be the navel of the world, but you were born of Leto’s womb. Our mother, who lived out her life in New York, loving us until the end. We were there when she died, remember?” Anger hid the desperation in her voice. “She was in a hospital bed. In Manhattan. Your name was Paul Solson, and you sang to her as she left the world.”
A flash of confusion marred the serenity of his expression, and he didn’t resist as Selene dragged him out of the Pythia’s chamber, through the temple, and back into the daylight.
A thousand people crushed close to the temple’s foundations; word had spread that an epiphany was at hand. No doubt as soon as the deities disappeared, the priests would carve the footprints of the gods onto the temple steps to remember the moment. Selene ignored them. She wished desperately that she had a magic gold pendant like Theo’s that would tell her how to return to the present. She’d rather fight any number of winged, fire-breathing guardians than wander helplessly in this past where she didn’t belong.
I entered this world through the pool in the cave, she decided finally. Perhaps I can leave through it as well.
Apollo’s hand in hers, she’d started back down the temple ramp when she noticed a lyre amid the other offerings in the vestibule.
The bridge between worlds hangs on lyre’s strings.
“Styx,” she cursed. She wasn’t sure she’d have made the connection if Theo hadn’t mentioned Orpheus in the Underworld.
Dragging Apollo behind her, she snatched up the lyre. I will make sure Theo succeeds where Orpheus failed.
She thrust the instrument at her brother, who took it eagerly. Like the one he’d held beside the Lake of Memory, the lyre was covered in gold, but this man-made object was far more ornate. Tiny embossed figures of silver and electrum danced across its arms; ivory crows’ heads served as tuning pegs; the gut strings burned carnelian red.
“Play something,” Selene ordered. “Something that will bring us home.”
“I told you, this is my home.”
“This place isn’t real. And even if it’s real in this past, it isn’t real in our present.”
“Please,” her twin said, his voice plaintive, insistent, no longer the confident prophet but rather the petulant boy she’d known in their childhood. The boy who wanted everything for himself—a bow and arrows, the love of any nymph he desired, his great-grandmother’s sacred oracle. “I like it here,” he whined, his golden eyes welling.
“Too bad.”
“I wouldn’t know what to play. If I did, don’t you think I would’ve played it to get out of the Underworld?”
“There, you were little more than a shade,” she reminded him. “Here, you’re a god. Now act like one.”
“But—”
“Orpheus was a mere mortal. Yet he escaped the Underworld by softening the hearts of Hades and Persephone with his song of grief. I can’t sing, Apollo, so you must do it for me. Sing of my sadness if you can’t find any of your own. Sing of my grief at losing you. I watched Saturn slice your heart out with his sickle, and I felt my own soul cleaved in two. I mourned as
only a twin can.”
Apollo’s fingers brushed against the lyre strings as she spoke. No melody yet, but a plaintive chord of longing.
“Life goes on without you,” she continued. “But it’s a life lived only in prose.”
He cast a glance at the silent crowd, the statue-clogged sanctuary, and she knew he still longed to stay in this Delphic past.
She let desperation leak into her voice. “Once you led the Muses. Do you remember?”
He picked out the simplest of tunes as he recited all nine of their names from Calliope through Urania. “Of course I remember.”
“Since I lost you, I’ve walked often with Melpomene, learning all she has to teach of tragedy. I have danced for Terpsichore; I have studied the stars for Urania; and today we walk through history with Clio. But what is a life without Euterpe’s poetry, Thalia’s comedy, Erato’s love songs, or Polyhymnia’s hymns? Without them, without you, I live in black and white and splashes of red. Bring back the rainbow, Apollo.”
“Do you really need me anymore?” He squinted, as if trying to remember something in the distant past. “I told you to find love in the arms of a mortal man, did I not?”
She laughed. “I did as you counseled. Then I threw that away, too. And I’ll never get it back again if I’m stuck here. So help me return! Help me save Theo. Help me rescue our father before Saturn kills him. Do it for me, even if you won’t do it for yourself.”
His golden eyes bored into hers, their old connection fused anew. His fingers danced upon the strings. His lips didn’t move, but she heard the song in her mind as only a goddess could. A song woven not by Greek words, nor English, but by the language of emotion. Not grief, as she had asked for, but love.
He dropped his hands from the lyre, yet the song went on. Selene wrapped her arms around her twin, and the song enveloped her like the lake, enfolding her in warmth and safety and light. Apollo’s skin grew hotter and hotter beneath her touch until it felt like holding the sun itself. But her own divine flesh could not burn.
Olympus Bound Page 22
